Friday is the New Learn Day

I’ve been working hard lately – getting new clients, building sites, trying new things, and pushing the limits on my skill-set. Its been good. I’ve been happy to have a continual flow of work.

The problem is that I’m not learning very much. “Pushing the limits on my skill-set” has been good, and I’ve learned new things because of that. But I’m still hungry for more.

So I decided that I will devote Fridays to learning.

Yes, the whole day.

I’ve been trying to fit in an hour of learning here or a half-hour there, but that just isn’t working for me. I need a set time, and I need to really “get into it”.

My plan is to work really hard Mon-Thurs so I can “earn” a Friday of non-billable work. I plan to study design, programming, and work on my portfolio site. I’m excited for Friday already. It gives me yet another reason to work really hard each day.

The issue has been that I just wasn’t taking the time to learn and practice new skills. I wanted to learn things, and have planned certain times to learn, but it just wasn’t happening. I am already doing several “daily” things, and I find that if I try to do too many of these “daily” things, I overwhelm myself and eventually do none of them. Three to five daily things is what seems to work best.

Since I still want to learn, I needed an alternate solution, so I decided to devote a whole day to it.

First, I’ll focus on finishing the Hack Design course. I’ve completed lessons zero and one, and am half-way through lesson two. While I’m in the design phase of learning, I plan to review HTML and CSS stuff and improve my skills there.

After a few weeks, I’ll move on to the programming side of things. I want to start with either Objective-C or Ruby on Rails. Reflecting on my new year’s resolution to program an iPhone app during the first half of this year, I’ll likely start with Objective-C. There are some awesome free resources out there and I plan to find the best and make good use of them.